


despite the abundance of it

by toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [10]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:58:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4157835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from Richard Siken's 'Crush'.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



> Title from Richard Siken's 'Crush'.

In the days since the trajectory of their little chats in the staff room and meals down at the local had become evident, Andrew had thought it would be awkward, Laurie an _eidolon_ between them. The similarity of feature that people still remarked on, three months into Ralph’s tenure at the school, had never much struck him as an obstacle. There was not, nor never had been, anything remotely fraternal in his feeling for Ralph Lanyon, and chance resemblance was hardly likely to create such when he had first been jealous of the man, then in some grudging awe, and finally affectionate.

But about Laurie he had been doubtful, unable to take from his mind the picture of them clinging wetly in Olive Lethbridge’s bathroom, or curled towards each other even in argument, or Laurie’s desperate blank look after Ralph packed his suitcase and left. It was all years ago now. He was just about the age himself that Laurie had been when they first met. But it had stayed in his mind as a portentous time, even though they had taken months to unravel, and Ralph, to his knowledge, had persevered almost a year longer. It might have helped that much of that time was at sea. Guilt accomplished many things.

It had stayed in his mind as the first time Ralph had kissed him, and the second. After the first shock of introduction, at the school they had been from the start cordial if at first distant. By the time Ralph had taken to dropping heavily into a chair opposite Andrew to hold forth in a furious whisper about the idiocy of boys and masters alike, it ought to have shrunk into vapour, next to nothing, a dream of memory. But he had nodded and smiled and hushed Ralph and added his own anecdata and looked at his stern mouth and thought of the wet slide of it, and thought of it again in the dark in his bed with the lights turned out. Since Laurie there had been one or two men, a matter of a friendly hand after a party or a quick stolen kiss before others entered the room. He had always been quiet, self-possessed, drawn into himself, and Laurie’s departure from Oxford had done little to draw him into the queer circles. Among the Friends there were one or two who knew about him and had been kinder than Dave, but none of his kind.

He had been lonely, give it its name, at Oxford and then worse, penned in among oblivious children, hormonal sixth-formers, and kindly old masters, most of whom had been brought out of retirement. The obnoxious joke about Mr. Phelps the Physics master ran along the lines of it being fortunate he’d known Isaac Newton, and doubtless there had been similar about Andrew’s immediate predecessor. Andrew, by simple virtue of having numbered less than two—or more usually three—score years, was a favourite among the boys, a position he found oppressive and vaguely frightening. Four years ago he would have liked it better, but four years ago he hadn’t known about himself. Consequently the news that the Headmaster had wrangled an interim teacher for Physics through some complicated chain of favours traversing cousins, employees, and just possibly a blood-pact made in the peaks and troughs of the Atlantic, had filled him with far more relief than trepidation. With men returning every day from active service, soon the school would be full of the old masters, about whom the boys spoke often and followed the casualty lists for as anxiously as their own brothers, cousins, uncles. Andrew himself could rest easy; he had stepped into a dead man’s shoes.

That it had been Ralph had been an unlooked for blessing in many ways. The boys had been unfailingly distracted by his motorbike, his cheerful instigation of practical experiments that involved explosions, and his impossible war-weary glamour. But it had done Andrew some good among the masters, too, who had for his entire tenure looked askance at the fit young man who had declined service and not even had the decency to be jailed over it. Ralph and he had wrung hands with unfeigned pleasure, and been forever in each other’s company, and the staff-room had thawed towards him in perceptible, rapid degrees. Andrew was too relieved to be resentful and besides liked Ralph too well.

They had written each other infrequently, and Andrew had kept an eye on casualty lists himself, but they had met only once, between Ralph’s departure that morning and the present, and then by chance for a few minutes while Ralph waited for his sister. They had been friends for a handful of years, and also for a handful of days.

Ralph settled into the school with a curious ease and into Andrew’s life with similar. They shared meals and cigarettes and gossip about the masters and boys and about friends the other had never met. During the war there had been the double constraint of Ralph’s service set against his abstention, and that they were friends not by choice but compulsion. To have lost these distinctions and to be—as they were in the eyes of the school—young men chance-met in war now pursuing a course of friendship, made things both easier and more difficult. Ralph looked at him sometimes—never in either the staff-room or in the pub, but in passing, on the street or on the school grounds –with an intent he made no effort to disguise. It wasn’t pursuit as much as a statement of intent. _Here I am, what do you want to do about it?_

Andrew did nothing. It wasn’t pretence, exactly. They were friends, and it was easier so. He had not been to bed properly with anyone in very nearly three years, and Ralph would not want a kiss or a fumble in the dark. Damningly, Andrew knew he would not want that himself, or not just that. Then, too, there was the thought of Laurie, though he had not heard news in years and doubted Ralph had.

Of their commonality in temperament they spoke once, glancingly, when Hughes went with unerring instinct to Ralph about a problem he wasn’t sure he could handle on his own and flat-out refused to report to either Mr. Locksley their House Master, or to the Head. Ralph, reporting an elided version to Andrew by way of asking him to be tender around the bruised egos of both boys in question, made a strangely feminine sound high in his throat and said, “I’d have given a lot to have a boy that sensible in my corner. Or to have been that sensible at his age. How young they all look.” Andrew had felt that something more was needed than an understanding nod, but they were smoking out behind the gymnasium and after a moment he was glad he’d ventured nothing when Hughes and Worthington strolled past, deep in conversation. Hughes’ head came up for a moment and Ralph blew a plume of smoke at him in lieu of a smile or greeting.

They were happy often. It hardly mattered whether they smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

In December amid the frenetic chaos of correcting papers and packing the boys home, Ralph said, “What are you doing over the vac?”

“I hadn’t thought,” Andrew confessed. “I’ve been neglecting Wat Tyler terribly; it’ll be good to have peace to work him over a while.”

“What a dedicat you are,” Ralph said, and laughed falsely. “Alright, I’d better revert to their awful scribbling or I’ll mark them in a hurry and be crueller than I ought.” He had been despairing half the evening over the definitions of force and momentum set down by the inky denizens of the Remove. Andrew, having virtuously done his own work until only the essays by the upper fifth and sixth were remaining, had been keeping him gloating company over surprisingly good mince-pie and a carafe of strong bitter tea, and occasionally deciphering the illegible fist of Bernard Jones, whose shaky grasp on spelling made this a further ordeal.

“What about you?”

“I was rather hoping to steal an idea from you,” Ralph confessed. “I haven’t had Christmas ashore since, oh, ’40 or thereabouts. Alec and I took a cottage somewhere in Dorset and holed up, the one year I had leave at about the right time. I’ve had Christmas in Singapore and the Cape Town and in Goa once, when we were docked in Bombay. I’ve been asked by my sister,” he said and grimaced awfully. “I suppose I ought to go. She’s being very kind. Can’t think how she got her husband to agree, probably he doesn’t know.”

Andrew, feeling quicksand open up beneath him, said, “You’ve only just got back in touch. I expect they’re all eager to include you.”

Ralph said, “Her son was four when I went to their house, after. Jeremy wouldn’t let me near him. He’s fifteen now,” and, while the pain rang through Andrew like a bell, bent his head with grave attention to the exercise book he’d been ignoring a good fifteen minutes.

After a while Andrew managed, “If you go I’ll see you in January. I’ve got to run down to London myself next week. It’s Dave’s birthday.” Things had been cool between them for a while and Andrew wanted to make an extra effort. Dave was getting on, and they had had a few scares. Tom had telephoned last month to say he’d been asking after Andrew. There was no need to say any of this to Ralph, who knew already. He was saying this at all to make things normal again, ease them out so he could ignore how he wanted to reach for Ralph.

But Ralph said, “My dear, I’m only here for this term. I thought you knew. The old physics master here, Stanley or Smythe or something, he’d been flying the Hump in the CBI, and has only just made his way back. They were expecting him six months ago; I was a last-minute patch job.”

“What will you do,” Andrew said, incapable of lifting his voice into an interrogative.

“I’m back to the BI,” Ralph said. “They practically hauled me out of my desk to send me down here anyway. Fortunately the girl who’d been doing my old job was in the same situation as the Head here: her husband was stuck in Burma for the duration and my old man was paying her more than anything else she’d found. But we’ll all be sorted come January.”

“Worthington will miss you,” Andrew managed. “And the Upper Fourth.”

“The Upper Fourth are venal brutes to the last boy and would need heart transplants to miss their own mothers,” Ralph said.

“Worthington’s perfectly tolerable,” Andrew said by rote. It was an argument of some weeks’ standing.

“Worthington isn’t in the Upper Fourth,” Ralph rejoined. “And Worthington’s not the one I want missing me.” In a brisker tone he said, “It’s going on ten, we’d better pack up.”

With the exams over, the library more days than not was utterly deserted, and Ralph had taken to finagling the keys from their ancient librarian and marking answers in its confines. Andrew had rapidly followed suit. In their rooms they were too likely to be disturbed by small boys requiring comfort or the older ones requiring counsel. Ralph was a peculiar favourite among his deeply-disliked Upper Fourth, which he found impossible to understand and Andrew felt owed much to a shared love of things that went fast and things that went boom.

They returned chairs to their wonted positions and stacked exercise books into perilous heaps threatening to topple from their arms. Outside the library Ralph set his on the floor and flicked off the lights and locked the door. The corridor stretched out in front of them institutionally beige. Their rooms were across the quad, next to each other. This had always struck Andrew as a source of obscure comfort.

He followed Ralph into his room and set his load on the table next Ralph’s. At the end of the day, whether they had spent it working together or apart, they shared a nightcap. Andrew was playing a game of hypotheticals, ritually going about his day as though Ralph had said nothing. _If Ralph hadn’t said what he said I would follow him in, I would take this seat, I would look idly through whatever exercise book he had left open on top,_ running in a fraying loop.

Ralph poured them both a slim finger of whisky from the stash he kept in a locked cabinet. Andrew, who still didn’t drink, took his tumbler without complaint and raised it numbly to his mouth. The whisky burnt, going down.

Ralph grimaced sympathetically. “Rotgut, I know. But with the market the way it is, about the best I can do.”

“I wasn’t drinking it for the taste,” Andrew said shortly, and drank the rest of it in a fiery mouthful.

“I didn’t say that to coerce an answer,” Ralph said. “I shouldn’t have said it all, I apologise. That was thoughtless...”

“You said it because you wanted to,” Andrew managed. “Now shut up for a minute, I’m trying to think. And sit down, would you?”

He examined himself in the breathing silence for reluctance, dislike, any longing for substitution, but even the ghost of nights with Laurie lay quiescent. In the harsh electric light Ralph looked washed out, his mouth and the scar on his left hand both vivid slashes of colour, his eyes hidden beneath hooded lids.

Ralph had come to the school almost straight from his last posting, underweight, underslept, and overworked. He had looked like nothing so much as Andrew’s memory of him hunched half-asleep and miserable in a bathtub four years before. Four months of school stodge and easy living had softened his jaw and filled out the hollows beneath his eyes. He had the long unseeing stare that had grown distressingly common, and beneath the crisp shirt his body was scarred and discoloured with old bruises.

Andrew paused at the thought, and ran his mind over it again, like a tongue probing a loose tooth for tenderness. He had a clear memory, against which he had been unconsciously comparing his remembrance of four years ago, of Ralph in the pool with the small boys, prodding them carefully along to the deep end, or at least off the steps. The usual gym teacher, a barrel-chested man of middle years with the unlikely name of Parker Featherstonehaugh, had hied himself with the School XI to play an away game and, the Head declaring the day too fine to waste, Ralph had been pressed into service. Andrew, passing by on his way to the tennis court where he had a standing appointment with their Latin master Tony Lewis, had chirped him about something inane and barely to do with swimming or water. Ralph had favoured him with a hard look that promised obscenity away from the waiting ears of children, and a showy dive that barely left a ripple. _Show_ - _off_ , Andrew had thought fondly, and passed on his way.

But he remembered, how clearly, every line of that body, from the oddly-splayed feet and defined calves, up to the trim waist widening into broad shoulders, the flat planes of chest and abdomen, the long arms corded with muscle and the slim hands with their long palms. At an age when men began to put on the solid bulk of their middle years, Ralph had retained a haggard semblance of youth. Beside any of the boys, or beside Andrew himself, he would look frayed, run-down, and his face had always been unwontedly grave, but war and relative privation had given him a lean and hungry look. A dangerous man, sitting quietly across the table, watching him with no sign of impatience.

Andrew rose from his seat and came around the table mindful of the teetering piles of exercise books, and leaned against Ralph, forehead to forehead, Ralph’s eyes filling his vision and Ralph’s shoulders tight under his hands.

In a tight, warning tone, Ralph said, “Andrew.”

He leaned down a little further and kissed Ralph, lightly, easily as Ralph had all that time ago. He had been used to thinking of it as a ploy or trick or test. Perhaps it had been. Now Ralph pulled back a little to look into his face and set their mouths together again, nudging at his nose to get closer, pushing at the closed seam of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. His hands were still on the armrests of the chair, but his shoulders loosened and he slumped as Andrew kept kissing him. It was tempting to lean more of his weight against Ralph, climb into the chair with him, but likely it wouldn’t support their weight, and for the things Andrew was planning, and he _was_ planning now, mind flashing furiously from one act to another, it might be better to have space.

Ralph, when he moved away, was pale with two hectic red spots high on his cheeks. In a voice kept forcedly light, he said, “Very nice. I don’t like being crowded without warning. Next time, ask.”

For a moment they looked at each other, then Ralph swung up from his chair and stepped close, ghosted a hand over Andrew’s face, and said, “May I?”


	3. Chapter 3

They ended in bed more through luck than good management, Andrew having first spent a good ten minutes pressed against the bookshelf while Ralph took him quietly apart with hands and mouth. He could feel the leather-bound spines digging into his back, a dictionary behind his head and the sharp edge of T.E. Lawrence’s _Odyssey_ jabbing him in the shoulder. Infinitely more important, Ralph’s mouth on the point of his jaw, teeth closing in a vicious nip, travelling up to tongue at his ear; Ralph’s hand learning the planes of his face, touching forehead, temple, cheekbone, nose, chin with starred knuckles, cupping his chin with fingers tight against his pulse, the callus slick against his mouth; Ralph’s body pressed against his, legs tangled, Ralph’s thigh between his legs; Ralph stopping with his fingers twisted around the top button of Andrew’s shirt, saying, “What do you want?”

Andrew said, “Everything,” and, trying to sound not quite so like a child in a toy-store, added, “I want to touch you, and I want you to touch me.”

“Everything,” Ralph said, sounding perilously amused, “is a distinct possibility, but we might begin with touch. You will tell me when you dislike something.”

“And if I like something?”

“I trust I’ll be able to tell,” Ralph said, and pressed a thigh closer between his legs by way of explanation.

 _His very voice changes_ , Andrew thought with a species of despair. He had known it for years, but then it had been stolen knowledge and he had gone away for a good forty minutes and knocked decorously upon his return. Now it was his to keep, along with Ralph’s fingers deft on the buttons of his shirt and then deft on his skin, skimming his sides almost to the point of laughter and thence to unbearable sensitivity, dipping into his navel for a quick curious second, thumbing the line of hair running below it, skimming up his stomach to brush the pads of his fingers lightly across his nipples and then again till they peaked, gripping him about the waist and dragging him by tortuous inches into a deeper kiss, sweeping up his back to gather his shirt in both fists and drag it down, leaving it hanging from his wrists and the waistband of his trousers.

“You run hot,” Ralph said into his collar-bone, and laved it. “How convenient.”

His words blew cold over Andrew’s skin, and he shivered, longing to put his hands on Ralph and incapable of it with his arms constrained still by the shirt. It felt odd and oddly comforting, to be penned in and unable to move while Ralph touched him with a coolness belied by the intense, evaluating look in his eyes. He wanted to thrash around and to touch Ralph and to hide himself against Ralph’s slim frame, but couldn’t manage even to look away from Ralph. He felt pinned by that blue stare like a moth on the head of a pin, held secure against all struggles.

“May I?” Ralph asked again, pressed his fingers hard against Andrew’s stomach and dragged them down, hooking the tips into his waistband and pulling a little, demonstratively. Off Andrew’s nod he unbuttoned and unzipped the fly of his trousers and tugged them down along with his underwear. The shirt, freed suddenly, followed their descent. Andrew, wishing he had thought beforehand to take off his shoes, stepped out of the tangle of cloth and put his arms around Ralph.

Ralph tipped his chin up with one finger and, pleased with whatever he saw, rubbed the other hand carefully down Andrew’s back, like he was soothing a skittish horse. Andrew stood in the circle of his arm feeling rather as though he had run a mile instead of walking a single step, and put his head against Ralph’s, nuzzled the fine fair hair, pressed a closed kiss against the curve of the skull above his ear, and then another on the scroll of it. He could feel the muscles unknotting in the wake of Ralph’s hand, the desire in his body to slump tiredly against Ralph and, running contrary to it, the desire to rut against him.

“Come lie down,” Ralph said. “I want to taste you if you’ll let me, and the floor will be murder on my knees.”

By the time his knees hit the bed the thought of sex had decisively won a quick, furious battle against the thought of sleep, and the texture of Ralph’s worn cotton sheets against his skin was far more engrossing than the give of his mattress, though that, too, was fascinating in its own way. Ralph pushed him back across the room with light touches, to his shoulder and torso and hip, the back of his hand brushing the upward thrust of Andrew’s erection for a second and retreating, and pressed forward when he fell back, climbing on the mattress, on his hands and knees above Andrew, his loosened tie dangling between them.

Andrew wrapped his hand around the length of it and pulled, getting elbowed in the side for his pains as Ralph came crashing down, landing with an exhale and a surprised laugh that pressed them closer together. Andrew put a hand on the back of his neck and kissed him again, holding him still and licking into his mouth, learning the shape of his teeth, the jagged edge where he’d chipped a canine, the deep well where a tooth had been extracted, the fleshiness of his tongue and how it retreated under onslaught and then came determined forward to meet it. A hard, untutored kiss, wet with want, and by the end of it he was surging up against Ralph, wrapping arms and legs around him, pushing his erect cock against Ralph’s clothed thigh.

“I know,” Ralph said, freeing his mouth. “I know. Lie still, now.” He traced with his mouth the path his hands had taken while Andrew stood shivering, not soothing now, but biting hard kisses into his throat and down his torso, lingering a moment on his nipples and at the shadowed divot of his navel, stopping with a hard kiss where the arrow of hair leading from it met the pubic bush. He took Andrew’s cock in hand, and licked a broad stripe from base to crown before sucking the head into his mouth. Andrew flailed a little, kneed him in the ribs, and went still again under the masterful hand on his hip.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew said, flushing a dull crimson, reaching for a convenient pillow to stifle himself.

Ralph smiled, straightened from his crouch till he was again kneeling over Andrew. His grip had changed from punishing into something nearly next door to a caress. “You didn’t put my eye out with it, at least. D’you like it too much or not at all?”

At some other time, about some other thing, he might have attempted a lie. He said, simply as a child confessing, “I want to keep kissing you,” and caught and held fast the hand Ralph reached out to him, wrapping his fist about the shorn fingers and tugging.

Ralph came easily, settling his weight on braced elbows and cupping Andrew’s face in his hands, holding him quiet for the kiss as he had been held. Lying like this, straining up naked and rampant against Ralph’s clothed, quiescent body, lent a queer charge to proceedings that combined strangely with Ralph’s pleasant distance, maintained as ruthlessly as though he was merely spectating while Andrew came apart.

“If you want only to kiss and part,” Ralph said, and he was still distinctly amused, “you need only say. This is more than I thought you’d like.”

“No.” He thought the word itself might have conveyed sincerity quite efficiently, but where it might have fallen short his hands convulsively gripping Ralph could hardly fail. “I do want everything.”

“Except to be fellated,” Ralph asked, solicitous, walking a hand down his side and over his hip to tug at his cock again. His other hand found its way into Andrew’s hair above the temple, stroked.

“I don’t like the taste,” Andrew said baldly, “and I don’t want to let go of you long enough for you to brush.”

He was expecting to be laughed at, at least a little, but Ralph only hummed a little, thoughtfully, and retreated into a crouch, patting Andrew reassuringly on the shoulder and flank as he went. He took the tie from about his neck and unknotting it wrapped its length around his hand, and then the hand around Andrew’s cock again.

Andrew thrust upwards, once then again, only Ralph’s weight on his thighs holding him down. The tie was silk, cool and heavy to the touch, the nearest thing to a mouth, enveloping him from base to crown. Ralph had large hands for a man of his height.

“I thought that would work,” Ralph said delightedly. “I knew a man once in Hong Kong who did much the same to me, though he used a scarf for this, and silk ropes, wound all about the body. Once I saw a boy suspended from the ceiling by a meat-hook, very nearly cocooned in ropes, very red against his skin. At first I thought it some sort of queer punishment, for he was being left severely to himself, but later I saw the charm of it, being restrained and put on display, and then I had to sharply revise my opinion of his stamina for I didn’t last nearly as long as he. Of course the silk itself was a novelty to me, and you’ll admit it has its charms,” he finished, and tugged a little harder at Andrew.

Orgasm hit Andrew like a mallet between the eyes. He bent nearly in half, straining upwards, and hauled Ralph down onto him, shaking apart with his face pressed against Ralph’s, too busy gasping for breath to kiss him. Ralph gentled him through it, hand still around his cock as it fell flaccid, body blanketing his, hushing him and muttering nonsense.

“Get under the covers,” Ralph said, the moment he could properly comprehend speech again, “you’ll get chilly. Bloody hell, Andrew, you couldn’t have started this before December?”

“I didn’t know,” Andrew said, being pushed beneath a mountain of bedclothes, “that there was anything to start.”

Ralph said, “Liar,” and turned away, climbing off the bed. Andrew reached for him and caught only the fingertips. “I’m only getting out of the clothes, my dear.” He was lashed with spending from navel to knee, stark white against his trousers, and the tie which he still held was glistening wet. And the man was fastidious as a cat. Andrew let go as though scalded.

Ralph stripped on his way to the adjoining half-bath, gathering his clothes and putting them in the waiting hamper. Andrew, long accustomed to considering that mixture of reticence and exhibitionism peculiarly Laurie’s, wondered idly of what other things he was to be shown the original.


	4. Chapter 4

Without any cognizance of sleep he came awake to Ralph in the bed beside him, reaching across him to place a small tub of Vaseline on the night-stand. It was an innocuous little thing—Andrew himself, due to a certain magpie propensity regarding first aid and a thorough understanding of its necessity among little boys, had several littering his rooms—but it ripped lassitude from him quick as a siren. When he turned, Ralph was looking at him inscrutably.

“If you want,” Ralph said, and put a hand blindly on his hip, felt the shape of it with his fingers, the bone jutting out, the curve of the flank, the crepe at the edges of his groin. Nothing in the touch, for all its care, spoke of distant affection.

“It’s been some time,” Andrew said with some difficulty, around a throat gone suddenly dry.

“About three years,” Ralph agreed, and before he could offer to finish him off with hands or mouth or between his thighs, said, “but I don’t need you careful.”

Hell. “I’ve never,” Andrew said, stopped and tried again. “I haven’t done that. _Ralph_.”

“Easily remedied,” Ralph said, and came up straddling him, holding himself scant inches from Andrew so only the heat from their bodies met and not skin. “May I?”

He took Andrew’s hand and thickly smeared the index finger with Vaseline, pulled it between his thighs and further back, brushing his scrotum, the tender skin of the perineum, and then up and against the folded close opening of his anus. His face was still calm, set as upon some task rendered difficult only through a period of disuse; his hand touching Andrew’s trembling own was steady. Only his penis left its limp drape against the thigh, and rose as Andrew touched him till it was perpendicular to the body, nearly touching Andrew’s stomach, the coarse hair beneath his navel.

“Does it hurt?” For Andrew himself, the first time it had been a world of pain; they had had to stop, and Laurie had been so abject as to require comfort rather than offering a scrap of it. Later it had grown easy, after the first difficult moment revelatory of great pleasure.

Ralph said, “Find out,” and forced his finger past muscular resistance.

Within he was blood warm, surging, a tight clamp around Andrew’s intrusion. Through the thin skin the blood beat in him, pulsing against Andrew’s skin, like setting hands on a living vein. Curious, he turned the finger this way and that, smearing melting Vaseline, mapping the inner space of the man.

Ralph said, “Pull out. Carefully. Coat two fingers, that’s it. Push in again, now, and spread your fingers. You must loosen the muscle first, or there might be bleeding, and will be pain. Just so.” He was harder now, his cock curved against his own belly and weeping clear liquid that matted the golden hair of his stomach and pubis, but the voice rang low and clear, as though he was teaching a difficult lesson to some bright young boy. If Andrew had not sat with him and spoken when he was drunk, he might even have been fooled.

“And now three?” he asked, pulling his fingers out again and reaching for the Vaseline. Somewhere within there was a swelling beneath the skin that had made him thrash and scream with pleasure when Laurie had found it.

“Not a bad thought,” Ralph said, “but unnecessary at the moment. It hasn’t been three years for me. Your turn again.” He worked as he spoke, smearing all the fingers of his intact hand thickly with Vaseline and wrapping it over Andrew’s penis, bringing it up to full hardness again.

Andrew reached for him with returning instinct, the position reversed but familiar, and Ralph gave voice to a reproving, artificial little laugh and slipped sideways to kneel on the bed facing forward. His body gave the lie persistently to his casual voice, the muscles of the back straining, starkly defined in long lines on either side of the channel of his spine and roping his thighs. Here too he was still golden and pale as he had been years ago underwater, in patches that too clearly betrayed patterns of modesty and exposure. At a touch on the hip he went down neatly, bending at the waist and letting shoulders fall and finally ducking his head down to rest on folded arms; at another, more urgent, simply set himself firmer into his stance. He could have been anyone, any body bent for pleasure, arm hidden and hair put out of sight and even his voice now extinguished.

From a stranger it would have been impeccable courtesy: unfamiliar forms flensed down to lines of indifferent desire. From Ralph, whose instrusions were characteristic and habitual, Andrew felt it a species of insouciant denial of a piece with the pedagogical patter. There was nothing like this in Ralph that he could not have had far more neatly at very little cost.

He was taller than Ralph, and built along broader lines, generations of soldiers in him set against farmers and factory workers. He should not want to fight Ralph who hid viciousness but barely beneath his skin, but taken unawares it was easy to turn him, put him on his back and crowd close.

“Like this,” he said, and when Ralph opened his mouth to offer reproof or correction, forestalled him with a hand pressed tight against his mouth, and said again, “like this. I want to see your face.” Ralph nodded, eyes very wide and with the arrogant, stern mouth hidden very young of a sudden.

They went on from there with a minimum of instruction, less efficient perhaps but Andrew at least easier out of the schoolroom at last.

The moment of penetration gave him pause. He had never, and sometimes the pain had gone on very long and they had ended in apologies and a curious, hurtful distance. Laurie had once, ruefully, explained it could have been easier but for his knee. He did not want for worlds to hurt Ralph, even for the pleasure of having him gasping in his arms. He knelt in a paralysis of terror, hand tight around the base of his erection, the tip of it, well-greased, pressing between Ralph’s buttocks.

Something of it must have shown on his face, because Ralph, pushed up on both elbows to investigate the delay, said, “Silly boy,” in a quiet voice that sounded neither false nor like him, and wrapped both legs about his waist to drag him inches closer.

For a moment they clung breathless, Andrew aware only of the heat around his erection contrasting painfully with the cold air playing around his overheated limbs, and Ralph’s body bent and face tight in a rictus of pain or else of pleasure outwardly indistinguishable from it. Then Ralph came gasping out of his arch, set hands tight about Andrew’s forearms and dragged him down till they were lying chest to chest, breath mingling. So close Andrew could barely move, and they nudged and shifted till he was fully sheathed in flesh, and then held, only breath pulling and pushing him infinitesimally. He was conscious of Ralph’s body anchoring him, locking him in with arms and legs about his abdomen, but only vaguely: all his conscious attention was fixated on the throb of his erection seated within Ralph, and Ralph’s nudging against his belly.

“Move,” Ralph said, “For God’s sake, move,” and ill-suited words to actions by pressing him closer and kissing him.

They came up still clutched together, Ralph on his knees straddling Andrew, pushing himself down to meet Andrew driving upward. They clashed at elbows and shoulders and Ralph’s laughing mouth closed hard around Andrew’s clavicle and bit down against a groan that went shuddering through both of them and then another in time with Andrew’s thrusts. On the third Andrew broke in orgasm, slackening against Ralph and slipping from him, dragging his hand down their bellies to take Ralph in hand and bring him off in the same daze.

They went down tangled like young boys after a hard day playing, even Ralph’s fastidiousness set momentarily aside in favour of seeking warmth. Under Andrew’s ear the blood thrummed steadily through Ralph, and his arm came up around Andrew’s shoulders to fold him closer.

Presently he said, “Well it makes a good ending,” in a voice peculiarly unconvinced of such a thing.

“Till January,” Andrew agreed, and hid a smile against skin to feel him relax in sleep.


End file.
